On being for something..............

"Don’t fight against the problem.  Fight for a solution."

-Patrick Rhone

“I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.”

-Mother Teresa

Important things to know.........

"To be a bourbon, in America you have to be using 51% or more corn, [and] the rest of the mash bill is traditionally rye and malted barley," he said.

"To be a rye whiskey, you have to use 51% or more rye, and then the rest is usually corn and malted barley."

-more on the differences between scotch, bourbon, and rye may be found here

via

image via

A pretty fair philosophy....................

        via

Blessings and curses...........

..........................often spring from the same source.   Ben Carlson offers some thoughts on the subject.   Wee excerpt here:

It became apparent that the smartest person in the room isn’t always right. In fact, most of the time their intelligence works against them because they’ve become so sure of themselves and their investing abilities that they’re unable to change their mind or accept the fact that the markets don’t care what your IQ is.

Illusions.....................................

One of the biggest illusions of life is that we humans are good at deducing the inner thoughts of both strangers and loved ones based on observing their actions. The truth is that we are terrible at knowing what others are thinking. We just think we are good at it. No one is good at it. No one.

-Scott Adams, as lifted from this post

Fifty years ago............................

Cliff Nobles & Co...............................................................The Horse

 

Highly recommended......................

Do not bother children when they..............

.........................are skateboarding.   A few excerpts from Rule 11:

     Some might call that stupid.  Maybe it was.  But it was brave, too.  I thought those kids were amazing.  I thought they deserved a pat on the back and some honest admiration.  Of course it was dangerous.   Danger was the point.  They wanted to triumph over danger.  They would have been safer in protective equipment, but that would have ruined it.  They weren't trying to be safe.  They were trying to be competent and it's competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be.

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Of course, culture is an oppressive structure.  It's always been that way.  It's a fundamental, universal existential reality.  The tyrannical king is a symbolic truth;  an archetypal constant.  What we inherit from the past is willfully blind, and out of date.  It's a ghost, a machine, and a monster.  It must be rescued, repaired and kept at bay by the attention and effort of the living.  It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential.  But it offers great gain, too.  Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors.  Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter.  The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors:  the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.  Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places if gives more with the other.  To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous.

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     Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together.  Do your work.  Pull your weight.  Stay awake and pay attention.  Don't whine or be touchy.  Stand up for your friends.  Don't suck up and don't snitch.  Don't be a slave to stupid rules.  Don't, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man.  Don't be dependent.  At all.  Ever.  Period.  The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test:  are you tough, entertaining, competent, and reliable?  If not, go away.  Simple as that.  We don't need to feel sorry for you.  We don't want to put up with your narcissism, and we don't want to do your work.

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And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.

-Jordan B. Peterson,  12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

Tell the truth, or at least,....................

..............................don't lie.   A few excerpts from Rule 8:

     Taking the easy way out or telling the truth - those are not merely two different choices.  They are different pathways through life.  They are utterly different ways of existing.

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     A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.  One forty-something told me his vision, formulated by his younger self:  "I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine."  That's not a plan.  That's a travel poster.  After eight margaritas, you're fit only to await the hangover.  After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you're bored stiff and self-disgusted.  In a year, or less, you're pathetic.  It's just not a sustainable approach to later life.  This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues.  They adopt a single axiom:  government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad.   Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom.  They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.

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If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.  If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably.  You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide.  And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.
     Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification.

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With love, encouragement, and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond imagining.

-Jordan B. Peterson,   12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote For Chaos

Set your house in perfect order before.......

............you criticize the world.   A few excerpts from Rule 6:

Consider your circumstances.  Start small.  Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you?  Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down?  Have you made peace with your brother?  Are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect?  Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being?  Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities?  Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members?  Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better?
     Have you cleaned up your life?
     If the answer is no, here's something to try:  Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.  Start stopping today. 

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Life is short, and you don't have tome to figure out everything on your own.  The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.

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Have some humility.  If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?


-Jordan B. Peterson,  12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

Fifty years ago.............................

Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66.................................The Look Of Love

 

On "plans"......................

Planning is the main way the human agent shapes his or her future actions, so as to realize temporally extended projects.  Planning now doesn't presume anything like "control" over future events, let alone give on reason to expect things to work out according to plan.  ... In shedding the illusion of control, along with the hope of attaining it, one can stand ready to revise one's plans, on the fly as necessary.  Best-laid plans do often go astray.  Because why wouldn't one have to adapt?  As in surfing, in life.

-Aaron James, Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Live Of Meaning

Market forces.....................................?

It is tempting to wonder if, in the future, today’s crisis will be seen as generated from the same kind of trauma, this time in reverse.  If industrialization caused an opium epidemic, deindustrialization is no small part of what’s fueling our opioid surge. It’s telling that the drug has not taken off as intensely among all Americans — especially not among the engaged, multiethnic, urban-dwelling, financially successful inhabitants of the coasts. The poppy has instead found a home in those places left behind — towns and small cities that owed their success to a particular industry, whose civic life was built around a factory or a mine. Unlike in Europe, where cities and towns existed long before industrialization, much of America’s heartland has no remaining preindustrial history, given the destruction of Native American societies. The gutting of that industrial backbone — especially as globalization intensified in a country where market forces are least restrained — has been not just an economic fact but a cultural, even spiritual devastation. The pain was exacerbated by the Great Recession and has barely receded in the years since. And to meet that pain, America’s uniquely market-driven health-care system was more than ready.

-Andrew Sullivan, as culled from this essay

thanks Michael

The good old days.................?

By 1870, opium was more available in the United States than tobacco was in 1970. It was as if the shift toward modernity and a wholly different kind of life for humanity necessitated for most working people some kind of relief — some way of getting out of the train while it was still moving.

-Andrew Sullivan, as taken from this essay

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Ohio anymore...

My Sweetie and I celebrated our tenth anniversary with a brief jaunt to the Sunshine State.  A good time was had by all.

Fifty years ago................................

At the bookstore.........................Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn

      The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.  She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night.  But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
     She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery.  Her neck was long and slender, making her head seem smaller than it was, and the mane that fell almost to the middle of her back was as soft as dandelion fluff and as fine as cirrus.  She had pointed ears and thin legs, with feathers of white hair at the ankles; and the long horn above her eyes shone and shivered with its own seashell light even in the deepest midnight.  She had killed dragons with it, and healed a king whose poisoned wound would not close, and knocked down ripe chestnuts for bear cubs.

Fifty years ago....................................

Judy Collins..................................Both Sides Now (non lip-synced)

 

Fifty years ago......................

Sly & The Family Stone......................................Dance To The Music

 

Random stuff found on the computer....

Fifty years ago..........................

On the TV.....................................Mr. Rogers Neighborhood debuts

 

Fifty years ago...................................

On the TV...................................Robert Wagner in It Takes A Thief

 

Just go with the flow...............

     Surfing has superb experiential flow qualities.  You often surf better if you think less and let the surfing come, maybe coaching yourself with "Okay, don't get bogged down in technicalities; just go with the flow."  When things are really coming together in a session or over a week, the flow experience comes on in full force.  You surf your best without trying, doing fluid, radical turns, which start feeling automatic, as though you are watching them just happen.  Time seems to slow.  You feel open, connected, empathetic, and yet effectual, in riding along with the physical liquid flow that is a breaking wave.  Those times of peak attunement are also fleeting.  No less important are the ordinary days, in ordinary waves, with all the mellow and harmonious feelings, the sheer fun and beauty of the deed, the pleasantness of being immersed in salty air, a wispy breeze, and glassy, gently shifting,  luminously reflecting seas.  "It's good just to get wet" is what surfers say.  You need it, often if not daily, to feel sane and stay stoked.

-Aaron James,  Surfing With Sartre:  An Aquatic Inquiry Into A Life Of Meaning